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Notes -
In defiance of the typical advice to avoid making any decisions for a year, my husband's desktop died while I was getting a backup of the data.
I have gotten the external raids mounted on another system to get them backed up. That leaves me with the internal drives. I don't see a raid card in the machine but I could be wrong. The symptoms of the machine are getting stuck in a boot loop. It dies/restarts at different points so I think it's the power supply. A drive enclosure is significantly cheaper than a replacement 825w power supply. It could be memory, but there's only one module so I can't do the easy test of swapping out memory/sockets to see if the problem goes away.
I don't exactly want to decide to let his system be dead. He was a gamer & also did tons of graphics processing and he babied this thing. But neither my daughter nor I have his use cases and resurrecting this just to shut it down after I get a backup seems pointless. If the internal drives are in a raid my decision is made for me. But if they're not...
This is why they say to not make major decisions for a year. Not just because it's too easy to decide something in the throes of madness, but also because your ability to think just flat out goes out the window.
So. Would you rebuild it? Play one last game of Half Life 2 since he'll never get to play 3 (like there will ever be 3) with his daughter? Or focus on the data and get backups of his photos and digital art and leave the hunk of metal dead like its owner?
Until you mentioned a daughter, I was 95% confident you were gay. Now I'm down to 10% confidence, mostly because of the possibility of adoption.
Oh. Reading along, I just realized he passed away. Sorry. I'm glad you're doing your best to keep his memories alive, and even play into his interests. If my future wife went to such lengths when I was in the grave, I would be very happy about it.
To actually answer your question, I think the data you extracted is worth more than the system itself (at least when it's clearly broken). If your husband was alive, he would probably care more about the fact that you retained the information and the fact you even want to play HL3 with your daughter, rather than the fact that you played it on his old pc. If your daughter wants to keep it, keep it. Otherwise you might feel a little better if you, say, gave away some of the working but unnecessary parts to charity or some eager kid who is friends or family. Thank you for trying, either way.
I've been told (by real life lesbians) I have a dyke aesthetic but that's as gay as I get.
Excess computer gear is definitely getting donated. We have the makings of a Very Nice homelab, especially if someone's interested in playing with VOIP and anything telephony. I'm pretty much all cloud these days and it's going to be hard enough to find someone who's interested in a few full size racks and a mix of equipment that includes 2U servers. I hate to think of this stuff going to scrap, but it may end up that way. (The kid's not interested in hardware & I doubt that'll change. So no need to hang on to it for the inevitable flip back to on-site data centers when everyone realizes VAX, oops, cloud, isn't the end-all.)
Thanks for the input. I'll try for the data on the drives as a first pass.
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